October 15, 2011

The Last Chance Saloon

"I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as
it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we
were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from
the abyss."
~Edward Grey

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the
fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of
these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like
this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I
mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how
much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.

But the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma
but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a
caricature of itself. During the debate, the hosts played a clip of
Ronald Reagan calling for increased revenue; today, no politician hoping
to get anywhere in Reagan’s party would dare say such a thing.

It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on
reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole
political party, one that already has the power to block anything the
president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government.

I've been saying for a while now that if the Republicans take the White House in 2012, or (Gods forbid) the Senate, the country as we know it will be gone. Bye-bye, United States of America. Welcome, the United Theocratic Oligarchy, of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%. Where (white) men rule the roost, women are little more than reproductive slaves, and the Civil Rights Act is eviscerated because of concerns over "property rights."

Where the barbarians not only have taken the gates, they sit upon the thrones.

Under such a scenario, it does not matter if you don't like President Obama or the Democrats. You need to quit whining, get off your ass and work for them anyway, because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.

Personally, I think there's far more and better reasons to re-elect Obama than that, and this site has a list of some of them. (This is the PG-rated version of the site, which I linked to only because I get tired of hearing effity effity eff all the time. The curse word "Battlestar Galactica" used, frak, is a lot cooler anyway.)

Nevertheless. The country made a huge mistake in the 2010 midterms. One wouldn't think so many people would be so mind-bogglingly wrong, but one can't underestimate the power of an ill-informed, pissed-off voter paired with the propaganda of Fake Noise. (I'm not going to explain that--if you don't know what it is, you must also figure the moon is made of green cheese.) Electing so many Republicans to office has crippled Congress, as Steve Benen so eloquently explains.

I think we've got one more chance to get it right. Otherwise, this noble two-hundred-year-old experiment will go down the tubes.